The
minimig is a project designed by Dennis van Weeren who is an excellent
electronic engineer. He designed AND build the first real working Amiga inside
an FPGA. Fortunately I was one of the lucky ones who got hold of such an unique
board of which only a few where made. This open source project is wonderfull
for everyone who wants to relive the Amiga glory days on REAL hardware not an
emulator but who also want to bennefit of modern electronics, storage media and
the versitallity of an FPGA.
a minimig
in working state running Kickstart 1.3 and kickstart 2.0
In order
to use the minimig to it’s full potential and to protect it from curious people
touching it... I decided to place it into a nice little box, I’ve added a small
PCB that holds 2 audio amplifiers (for the Amiga’s stereo sound), some switches
for system configuration and selection and a joystick connector extension to
use the joystick connectors from the rear of the box instead of the side. I
also added a small RGB LCD display. So now I can place the whole with a
keyboard and mouse in a small corner on my desktop and I can look at it and
enjoy this marvelous piece of technical engineering when ever I want. The
minimig makes it easy for me to play clasical Amiga games on a real machine
instead of an emulator.
The
minimig is one of the most impressive projects I’ve seen. Knowing that Dennis
did not know anything about programming FPGA’s when he began the project and
seeing the result one year later. I’m impressed. And then also keep in mind
that he did it all on his own, no help from others, just books, the internet
and a lot... a lot of patience. He did not have access to fancy logic analysers
and only worked in his spare time. If you consider that there are companies who
are trying to achieve the same goal. He didn’t bragg about it, he just build
it. No fancy demonstrations, no fuss, just a working Amiga inside an FPGA...
The
minimig configures very nicely and gives you the feeling you’re using a real
Amiga. Minimig... thumbs up!!!
PS:
because the minimig is a reconfigureable computer (in the future) it can also
be used to operate with different cores. For example the porting of existing
cores in order to work on the minimig (example: C64, VIC20) would make the
Minimig a very versatile machine.
Below the
promotional film I made for the minimig, it also shows the case above but then
with a more suiting keyboard. Have fun watching...
The
minimig configures very nicely and gives you the feeling you’re using a real
Amiga. Minimig... thumbs up!!!